Devices for dispensing sheets of material from a roll are well known. In their simplest form the free end of the material is grasped and pulled manually. Once the required amount of material has been pulled free of the roll, the strip of material is torn on a serrated edge of the packaging containing the roll of material to form a sheet as required. Dispensers for semi-automatically dispensing a predetermined length of material are also known in which a motor drives rollers for advancing a sheet of predetermined length of material which can be manually torn on a serrated edge of the dispenser.
Using sheets of aluminium foil in colouring (highlighting) hair is well known. The process requires the hairdresser to pick up a pre-cut sheet of foil with one hand whilst holding the prepared section of hair with the other. The hairdresser must then fold the upper edge of the sheet whilst holding the prepared section of hair. This folded edge forms a solid edge to fit tightly under the roots of the prepared section of hair. The prepared section of hair lies on the sheet separated from the rest of the hair and the colour is brushed onto the prepared section of hair. The folded edge is important as it provides a tight fit to the roots of the coloured hair to avoid the colour “bleeding”. The process requires many sheets of foil which have to be pre-cut before the colouring process. Depending on the length of the hair to be coloured, different lengths of foils may be required.
Invariably, salons store the foils in pre-cut format which is inconvenient as the foil can become easily damaged or creased making them unsuitable for their purpose. In the manual and semi-automatic dispensers mentioned above, many sheets of foil have to be prepared before the colouring process and it is not possible for the hairdresser to predict the exact number of foils required for a particular treatment and therefore, inconveniently, the hairdresser may have too few or too many sheets of foil.
Further, such prior art dispensers do not provide completely prepared sheets of foil in that one edge of the sheet is not folded to provide the edge required for the roots of the hair. Therefore, in using such dispensers, the hairdresser is still required to fold the edge whilst holding the prepared section of hair which can be cumbersome as well as time consuming.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,602,177 provides a solution by providing a dispenser for automatically producing sheets of foil for hair colouring in which one edge is folded. The dispenser operates such that a strip of foil is fed from a roll by two pairs of nip rollers. A cutter and folding assembly is provided between the pairs of nip rollers. Firstly a sheet of foil is cut from the strip and the trailing edge of the sheet is folded by firstly pressing the edge into a vertical V-shape and folding down the upper edge of the V-shaped edge with a resilient roller and a knockdown table. The cut and folded sheet is then dispensed through the downstream pair of nip rollers. As the fold is formed in the trailing edge, the downstream nip rollers catch the fold, which can crease the fold further forming a multi-layered fold, and due to the bulk of the fold, the dispenser is inclined to jam. Alternatively the downstream nip rollers cause the fold to unfold. Furthermore the folding assembly comprises a press to form the V-shaped edge and a roller to crease and form the fold making the dispenser complex in design.